Jeffrey Kindler’s surprise announcement this week that he was stepping down as Pfizer Inc.’s CEO caught people’s eye because of the reason he said he was leaving: The job, he said, had burned him out.
By all accounts, Kindler was under real strain. Pfizer faced a number of business challenges, including some major R&D failures. He worked grueling hours. And “he was becoming increasingly frazzled,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
Peter Drucker certainly understood the tremendous pressure that top executives are under. “There is constant pressure on every CEO to do a little bit of everything,” he wrote. “That makes everybody happy but guarantees that there are no results.”
Drucker’s advice: When you find you have no energy left, try “repotting yourself.” Get out of the office more. Become a volunteer. Make sure you learn something new. “Precisely because you are overworked,” Drucker wrote, “you need the extra—and different—stimulus to put different parts of yourself to work, both physically and mentally.”
So, what do you think: Are more people these days stressed by overwork, or simply bored by their jobs?
Burned out or just bored?
The great corporate poet, David Whyte once said that “the cure to exhaustion is wholeheartedness”. It seems that burning out and boredom may be the same thing.
I think its a vicious cycle. The boredom leads to disengagement. Disengagement makes you drag along with the work (theres no escape!) which sooner or later results into burn out.
Having worked in corporate settings, I see top level execs concern themselves with being involved with too much on the tactical level rather than leading and allowing good people to execute for them. I think there are two things: I think most people don’t LOVE what they do, and I think most people are afraid to try and find what they love to do because, hey, we all gotta make money. But these two things lead to boredom with the job due to lack of interest, and stress that it must be performed or they will lose their jobs.
I’m reminded of an insight shared by poet David Whyte (actually, by his friend, Brother David, a Benedictine monk) in Crossing the Unknown Sea:
the antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness